OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
How Visa-Free Policies Fuel International Research Collaboration: Evidence from China
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2025
Year: 2025

Visa regimes constitute significant institutional barriers to the cross-border mobility of researchers. Utilizing China's phased implementation of a unilateral visa-free policy since 2023 as a quasi-natural experiment, this study employs a staggered difference-in-differences design to assess the policy's effect on international scientific collaboration. Results indicate that the policy significantly increased the volume of Sino-foreign co-authored publications. The mechanism analysis indicates that this effect is primarily achieved by enhancing transportation accessibility and human mobility, which in turn facilitates cross-border research collaboration among scholars. Further evidence suggests that academic conferences partially attenuated the policy's impact, indicating a substitutive relationship across collaboration channels. Moreover, the effect was more pronounced for countries with greater geographical distance or lower research capacity. This study elucidates the mechanisms through which visa facilitation promotes international scientific collaboration and offers new insights into how institutional barriers shape research cooperation and knowledge production.
Measuring What Matters: Scenario-Driven Evaluation for Trajectory Predictors in Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Being able to anticipate the motion of surrounding agents is essential for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems in dynamic situations. While various methods have been proposed for trajectory prediction, the current evaluation practices still rely on error-based metrics (e.g., ADE, FDE), which reveal the accuracy from a post-hoc view but ignore the actual effect the predictor brings to the self-driving vehicles (SDVs), especially in complex interactive scenarios: a high-quality predictor not only chases accuracy, but should also captures all possible directions a neighbor agent might move, to support the SDVs' cautious decision-making. Given that the existing metrics hardly account for this standard, in our work, we propose a comprehensive pipeline that adaptively evaluates the predictor's performance by two dimensions: accuracy and diversity. Based on the criticality of the driving scenario, these two dimensions are dynamically combined and result in a final score for the predictor's performance. Extensive experiments on a closed-loop benchmark using real-world datasets show that our pipeline yields a more reasonable evaluation than traditional metrics by better reflecting the correlation of the predictors' evaluation with the autonomous vehicles' driving performance. This evaluation pipeline shows a robust way to select a predictor that potentially contributes most to the SDV's driving performance.
Semantic Zone based 3D Map Management for Mobile Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Mobile robots in large-scale indoor environments, such as hospitals and logistics centers, require accurate 3D spatial representations. However, 3D maps consume substantial memory, making it difficult to maintain complete map data within limited computational resources. Existing SLAM frameworks typically rely on geometric distance or temporal metrics for memory management, often resulting in inefficient data retrieval in spatially compartmentalized environments. To address this, we propose a semantic zone-based 3D map management method that shifts the paradigm from geometry-centric to semantics-centric control. Our approach partitions the environment into meaningful spatial units (e.g., lobbies, hallways) and designates these zones as the primary unit for memory management. By dynamically loading only task-relevant zones into Working Memory (WM) and offloading inactive zones to Long-Term Memory (LTM), the system strictly enforces user-defined memory thresholds. Implemented within the RTAB-Map framework, our method demonstrates substantial reductions in unnecessary signature load/unload cycles and cumulative memory utilization compared to standard approaches. The results confirm that semantic zone-based management ensures stable, predictable memory usage while preserving map availability for navigation. Code is available at: https://github.com/huichangs/rtabmap/tree/segment
Learning to Get Up Across Morphologies: Zero-Shot Recovery with a Unified Humanoid Policy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

Fall recovery is a critical skill for humanoid robots in dynamic environments such as RoboCup, where prolonged downtime often decides the match. Recent techniques using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have produced robust get-up behaviors, yet existing methods require training of separate policies for each robot morphology. This paper presents a single DRL policy capable of recovering from falls across seven humanoid robots with diverse heights (0.48 - 0.81 m), weights (2.8 - 7.9 kg), and dynamics. Trained with CrossQ, the unified policy transfers zero-shot up to 86 +/- 7% (95% CI [81, 89]) on unseen morphologies, eliminating the need for robot-specific training. Comprehensive leave-one-out experiments, morph scaling analysis, and diversity ablations show that targeted morphological coverage improves zero-shot generalization. In some cases, the shared policy even surpasses the specialist baselines. These findings illustrate the practicality of morphology-agnostic control for fall recovery, laying the foundation for generalist humanoid control. The software is open-source and available at: https://github.com/utra-robosoccer/unified-humanoid-getup
Differentially Private Online Distributed Aggregative Games With Time-Varying and Non-Identical Communication and Feedback Delays
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates online distributed aggregative games with time-varying cost functions, where agents are interconnected through an unbalanced communication graph. Due to the distributed and noncooperative nature of the game, some curious agents may wish to steal sensitive information from neighboring agents during parameter exchanges. Additionally, communication delays arising from network congestion, particularly in wireless settings, as well as feedback delays, can hinder the convergence of agents to a Nash equilibrium. Although a recent work addressed both communication and feedback delays in aggregative games, it is based on the unrealistic assumption that the delays are fixed over time and identical across agents. Hence, the case of time-varying and non-identical delays across agents has never been considered in aggregative games. In this work, we address the combined challenges of privacy leakage with time-varying and non-identical communication and feedback delays for the first time. We propose an online distributed dual averaging algorithm that simultaneously tackles these challenges while achieving a provably low regret bound. Our simulation result shows that the running average of each client's local action converges over time.
V-Warper: Appearance-Consistent Video Diffusion Personalization via Value Warping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Video personalization aims to generate videos that faithfully reflect a user-provided subject while following a text prompt. However, existing approaches often rely on heavy video-based finetuning or large-scale video datasets, which impose substantial computational cost and are difficult to scale. Furthermore, they still struggle to maintain fine-grained appearance consistency across frames. To address these limitations, we introduce V-Warper, a training-free coarse-to-fine personalization framework for transformer-based video diffusion models. The framework enhances fine-grained identity fidelity without requiring any additional video training. (1) A lightweight coarse appearance adaptation stage leverages only a small set of reference images, which are already required for the task. This step encodes global subject identity through image-only LoRA and subject-embedding adaptation. (2) A inference-time fine appearance injection stage refines visual fidelity by computing semantic correspondences from RoPE-free mid-layer query--key features. These correspondences guide the warping of appearance-rich value representations into semantically aligned regions of the generation process, with masking ensuring spatial reliability. V-Warper significantly improves appearance fidelity while preserving prompt alignment and motion dynamics, and it achieves these gains efficiently without large-scale video finetuning.
Entropy Collapse: A Universal Failure Mode of Intelligent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2025
Year: 2025

Intelligent systems are widely assumed to improve through learning, coordination, and optimization. However, across domains -- from artificial intelligence to economic institutions and biological evolution -- increasing intelligence often precipitates paradoxical degradation: systems become rigid, lose adaptability, and fail unexpectedly. We identify \emph{entropy collapse} as a universal dynamical failure mode arising when feedback amplification outpaces bounded novelty regeneration. Under minimal domain-agnostic assumptions, we show that intelligent systems undergo a sharp transition from high-entropy adaptive regimes to low-entropy collapsed regimes. Collapse is formalized as convergence toward a stable low-entropy manifold, not a zero-entropy state, implying a contraction of effective adaptive dimensionality rather than loss of activity or scale. We analytically establish critical thresholds, dynamical irreversibility, and attractor structure and demonstrate universality across update mechanisms through minimal simulations. This framework unifies diverse phenomena -- model collapse in AI, institutional sclerosis in economics, and genetic bottlenecks in evolution -- as manifestations of the same underlying process. By reframing collapse as a structural cost of intelligence, our results clarify why late-stage interventions systematically fail and motivate entropy-aware design principles for sustaining long-term adaptability in intelligent systems. \noindent\textbf{Keywords:} entropy collapse; intelligent systems; feedback amplification; phase transitions; effective dimensionality; complex systems; model collapse; institutional sclerosis
Efficiently Approximating the Minimum-Volume Bounding Box of a Point Set in Three Dimensions
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2025
Year: 2025

$\renewcommand{\Re}{\mathbb{R}}$We present an efficient $O (n + 1/\varepsilon^{4.5})$-time algorithm for computing a $(1+\varepsilon$)-approximation of the minimum-volume bounding box of $n$ points in $\Re^3$. We also present a simpler algorithm (for the same purpose) whose running time is $O (n \log{n} + n / \varepsilon^3)$. We give some experimental results with implementations of various variants of the second algorithm. The implementation of the algorithm described in this paper is available online https://github.com/sarielhp/MVBB.
Reputation-Based Leader Election under Partial Synchrony: Towards a Protocol-Independent Abstraction with Enhanced Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Leader election serves a well-defined role in leader-based Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols. Existing reputation-based leader election frameworks for partially synchronous BFTs suffer from either protocol-specific proofs, narrow applicability, or unbounded recovery after network stabilization, leaving an open problem. This paper presents a novel protocol-independent abstraction formalizing generic correctness properties and effectiveness guarantees for leader election under partial synchrony, enabling protocol-independent analysis and design. Building on this, we design the Sliding Window Leader Election (SWLE) mechanism. SWLE dynamically adjusts leader nominations via consensus-behavior-based reputation scores, enforcing Byzantine-cost amplification. We demonstrate SWLE introduces minimal extra overhead to the base protocol and prove it satisfies all abstraction properties and provides superior effectiveness. We show, with a 16-server deployment across 4 different regions in northern China, SWLE achieves up to 4.2x higher throughput, 75% lower latency and 27% Byzantine leader frequency compared to the state-of-the-art solution under common Byzantine faults, while maintaining efficiency in fault-free scenarios.
Sim2Real Reinforcement Learning for Soccer skills
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This thesis work presents a more efficient and effective approach to training control-related tasks for humanoid robots using Reinforcement Learning (RL). The traditional RL methods are limited in adapting to real-world environments, complexity, and natural motions, but the proposed approach overcomes these limitations by using curriculum training and Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP) technique. The results show that the developed RL policies for kicking, walking, and jumping are more dynamic, and adaptive, and outperformed previous methods. However, the transfer of the learned policy from simulation to the real world was unsuccessful, highlighting the limitations of current RL methods in fully adapting to real-world scenarios.
Exploring the Design Space of Transition Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Transition Matching (TM) is an emerging paradigm for generative modeling that generalizes diffusion and flow-matching models as well as continuous-state autoregressive models. TM, similar to previous paradigms, gradually transforms noise samples to data samples, however it uses a second ``internal'' generative model to implement the transition steps, making the transitions more expressive compared to diffusion and flow models. To make this paradigm tractable, TM employs a large backbone network and a smaller "head" module to efficiently execute the generative transition step. In this work, we present a large-scale, systematic investigation into the design, training and sampling of the head in TM frameworks, focusing on its time-continuous bidirectional variant. Through comprehensive ablations and experimentation involving training 56 different 1.7B text-to-image models (resulting in 549 unique evaluations) we evaluate the affect of the head module architecture and modeling during training as-well as a useful family of stochastic TM samplers. We analyze the impact on generation quality, training, and inference efficiency. We find that TM with an MLP head, trained with a particular time weighting and sampled with high frequency sampler provides best ranking across all metrics reaching state-of-the-art among all tested baselines, while Transformer head with sequence scaling and low frequency sampling is a runner up excelling at image aesthetics. Lastly, we believe the experiments presented highlight the design aspects that are likely to provide most quality and efficiency gains, while at the same time indicate what design choices are not likely to provide further gains.
Simultaneous AlphaZero: Extending Tree Search to Markov Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

Simultaneous AlphaZero extends the AlphaZero framework to multistep, two-player zero-sum deterministic Markov games with simultaneous actions. At each decision point, joint action selection is resolved via matrix games whose payoffs incorporate both immediate rewards and future value estimates. To handle uncertainty arising from bandit feedback during Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), Simultaneous AlphaZero incorporates a regret-optimal solver for matrix games with bandit feedback. Simultaneous AlphaZero demonstrates robust strategies in a continuous-state discrete-action pursuit-evasion game and satellite custody maintenance scenarios, even when evaluated against maximally exploitative opponents.
Explainable AI as a Double-Edged Sword in Dermatology: The Impact on Clinicians versus The Public
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly permeating healthcare, from physician assistants to consumer applications. Since AI algorithm's opacity challenges human interaction, explainable AI (XAI) addresses this by providing AI decision-making insight, but evidence suggests XAI can paradoxically induce over-reliance or bias. We present results from two large-scale experiments (623 lay people; 153 primary care physicians, PCPs) combining a fairness-based diagnosis AI model and different XAI explanations to examine how XAI assistance, particularly multimodal large language models (LLMs), influences diagnostic performance. AI assistance balanced across skin tones improved accuracy and reduced diagnostic disparities. However, LLM explanations yielded divergent effects: lay users showed higher automation bias - accuracy boosted when AI was correct, reduced when AI erred - while experienced PCPs remained resilient, benefiting irrespective of AI accuracy. Presenting AI suggestions first also led to worse outcomes when the AI was incorrect for both groups. These findings highlight XAI's varying impact based on expertise and timing, underscoring LLMs as a "double-edged sword" in medical AI and informing future human-AI collaborative system design.
Bounded Dynamic Level Maintenance for Efficient Logic Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2025
Year: 2025

Logic optimization constitutes a critical phase within the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flow, essential for achieving desired circuit power, performance, and area (PPA) targets. These logic circuits are typically represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), where the structural depth, quantified by node level, critically correlates with timing performance. Modern optimization strategies frequently employ iterative, local transformation heuristics (\emph{e.g.,} \emph{rewrite}, \emph{refactor}) directly on this DAG structure. As optimization continuously modifies the graph locally, node levels require frequent dynamic updates to guide subsequent decisions. However, a significant gap exists: existing algorithms for incrementally updating node levels are unbounded to small changes. This leads to a total of worst complexity in $O(|V|^2)$ for given local subgraphs $\{ΔG_i\}_{i=1}^{|V|}$ updates on DAG $G(V,E)$. This unbounded nature poses a severe efficiency bottleneck, hindering the scalability of optimization flows, particularly when applied to large circuit designs prevalent today. In this paper, we analyze the dynamic level maintenance problem endemic to iterative logic optimization, framing it through the lens of partial topological order. Building upon the analysis, we present the first bounded algorithm for maintaining level constraints, with $O(|V| Δ\log Δ)$ time for a sequence $|V|$ of updates $\{ΔG_i\}$, where $Δ= \max_i \|ΔG_i\|$ denotes the maximum extended size of $ΔG_i$. Experiments on comprehensive benchmarks show our algorithm enables an average 6.4$\times$ overall speedup relative to \rw and \rf, driven by a 1074.8$\times$ speedup in the level maintenance, all without any quality sacrifice.
Vertical Heterogeneous Networks Beyond 5G: CoMP Coverage Enhancement and Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

Low-altitude wireless networks are increasingly vital for the low-altitude economy, enabling wireless coverage in high-mobility and hard-to-reach environments. However, providing reliable connectivity to sparsely distributed aerial users in dynamic three-dimensional (3D) spaces remains a significant challenge. This paper investigates downlink coverage enhancement in vertical heterogeneous networks (VHetNets) beyond 5G, where uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) operate as emerging aerial base stations (ABSs) alongside legacy terrestrial base stations (TBSs). To improve coverage performance, we propose a coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission framework that enables joint transmission from ABSs and TBSs. This approach mitigates the limitations of non-uniform user distributions and enhances reliability for sparse aerial users. Two UAV deployment strategies are considered: \textit{i)} random UAV placement, analyzed using stochastic geometry to derive closed-form coverage expressions, and \textit{ii)} optimized UAV placement using a coverage-aware weighted $K$-means clustering algorithm to maximize cooperative coverage in underserved areas. Theoretical analyses and Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the proposed CoMP-enabled VHetNet significantly improves downlink coverage probability, particularly in scenarios with sparse aerial users. These findings highlight the potential of intelligent UAV coordination and geometry-aware deployment to enable robust, adaptive connectivity in low-altitude wireless networks.
On the Accuracy of Newton Step and Influence Function Data Attributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Data attribution aims to explain model predictions by estimating how they would change if certain training points were removed, and is used in a wide range of applications, from interpretability and credit assignment to unlearning and privacy. Even in the relatively simple case of linear regressions, existing mathematical analyses of leading data attribution methods such as Influence Functions (IF) and single Newton Step (NS) remain limited in two key ways. First, they rely on global strong convexity assumptions which are often not satisfied in practice. Second, the resulting bounds scale very poorly with the number of parameters ($d$) and the number of samples removed ($k$). As a result, these analyses are not tight enough to answer fundamental questions such as "what is the asymptotic scaling of the errors of each method?" or "which of these methods is more accurate for a given dataset?" In this paper, we introduce a new analysis of the NS and IF data attribution methods for convex learning problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis of these questions that does not assume global strong convexity and also the first explanation of [KATL19] and [RH25a]'s observation that NS data attribution is often more accurate than IF. We prove that for sufficiently well-behaved logistic regression, our bounds are asymptotically tight up to poly-logarithmic factors, yielding scaling laws for the errors in the average-case sample removals. \[ \mathbb{E}_{T \subseteq [n],\, |T| = k} \bigl[ \|\hatθ_T - \hatθ_T^{\mathrm{NS}}\|_2 \bigr] = \widetildeΘ\!\left(\frac{k d}{n^2}\right), \qquad \mathbb{E}_{T \subseteq [n],\, |T| = k} \bigl[ \|\hatθ_T^{\mathrm{NS}} - \hatθ_T^{\mathrm{IF}}\|_2 \bigr] = \widetildeΘ\!\left( \frac{(k + d)\sqrt{k d}}{n^2} \right). \]